Research news

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have written a
letter asking their colleagues worldwide to boycott all journals published by Cell Press - including Cell, Molecular Cell, and Neuron - to protest the high price of electronic access.

In the letter, Peter Walter and Keith Yamamoto write that Elsevier, owner of Cell Press, is asking the University of California
for an additional $90,000 per year to provide electronic access to the six Cell Press
titles - when the university already paid Elsevier $8 million for online access to
its other journals in 2002 alone.

Walter told us that he and Yamamoto decided to write the letter when they lost access
to Cell Press journals after moving to a campus that was 20 minutes away from the
main campus, which carries paper copies of the journals. They then learned that the
university had been trying unsuccessfully to reach a deal with Elsevier for electronic
access since 1998.

The letter urges their colleagues to resign from the editorial boards of Cell Press,
to stop submitting papers, and to refuse to review manuscripts for the journals, which
also include Developmental Cell, Cancer Cell, and Immunity. While publishing a paper in the prestigious Cell Press titles is a career goal for
many researchers, Walter told us that there is little glory in publishing in an outlet
that is inaccessible to others. "There's no point to having the little gold star attached
to your papers if your colleagues can't read them," he said.

In response to the letter, Lynne Herndon, president and chief executive officer of
Cell Press, distributed an E-mail last Friday (October 17) offering all UC researchers
who registered a username and password free electronic access to Cell Press titles
through the end of the year.

Walter and Yamamoto responded Monday (October 20) with another E-mail, reminding UC
researchers that Cell Press had offered trial electronic access to the journals before,
then removed that access when negotiations with the university fell apart. Consequently,
they urged their colleagues to maintain the boycott.

Walter added that he would be satisfied with even a small response from the research
community. "Even if [Elsevier] only gets five papers less," he said, he believed the
company would see that what it is doing is wrong.

On Wednesday (October 22), Herndon released another statement calling the $90,000
annual fee for the six Cell Press journals "an excellent value," equivalent to roughly
$1.50 per journal per year for each active user within the UC system.

Herndon told us she hopes that the latest statement will encourage scientists to put
the prospect of a boycott on hold until they see the result of talks with the university,
and will "pave the way for successful negotiations between Cell Press" and the California Digital Library, which handles journal contracts for the university.

However, the California Digital Library has rejected Cell Press's latest offer. Karen
Butter, librarian at the University of California, San Francisco, told us that UCSF
pays only $5000 per year for electronic access to the New England Journal of Medicine. The university rejected Cell Press's offer because Elsevier already receives a lot
of money from the university, she said, and the company has not adequately explained
why they need more for the additional journals. She added that she hopes the boycott
forces Elsevier to "think twice about their pricing strategy" because we can't afford
it."

Walter said that so far, his colleagues' reactions to the call to boycott have been
"incredibly positive." However, one researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity,
cautioned that the Public Library of Science (PloS) tried a similar technique a few
years ago, in which they asked researchers to boycott all journals that did not provide
free access to their material. Many journals did not comply with that request, and
no significant boycott occurred, he noted. "The track record [for boycotts] is not
very good," the researcher said. "And if PLoS failed, these guys might fail."

Matthew Scott of Stanford University told us he had passed the letter onto some colleagues, who
seemed "largely quite enthusiastic about moves in this direction." He noted that Stanford
currently has electronic access to the journals, but access has been spotty because
of the cost.

He predicted that over time, researchers will submit fewer papers to costly journals
and more to journals that provide free access to material. "People will turn more
and more to that model, because they're so fed up with being denied access," he said.